Mila Jaroniec

Mila Jaroniec lives and writes in New York. You can read her super short fiction on various places on the internet ...

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While it’s true that tequila can mysteriously sneak up on the best of us at the end of the night, you actually like to start off with tequila, which automatically makes you a masochistic weirdo. However, it also makes you impressively goal-oriented: you don’t drink to get drunk, you drink to get cray, and how are you supposed to get there by sipping on weak ass cocktails for three hours?

And the main reason I’ve been avoiding it is because being naked sober is hard, damn it. At least for me it is — I still have all the body issues I had as a teenager, only now I’m able to identify them.

Rilke wrote that we all carry our death inside of us, that it grows, develops, changes with us until it’s strong enough to take hold. My brother’s death was unfurling like a dragon, fast and aggressive. It was coded in his DNA.

In our culture, sex outside of a monogamous relationship is typically frowned upon. We think it’s wrong, make all kinds of assumptions about the people engaging in it and like to think there’s something inherently damaged or incomplete about them. We tend to hate the idea of sex being a fun activity, of it being a purely physical experience.

I can make myself sick in every way I can think of. Drink too much, vomit bile, mute my thoughts with downers; burn through countless packs of cigarettes to keep my hands from shaking, curl up close my eyes and rub out the dull headache.

In a way, though, I know you didn’t really feel nervous. Sure you felt kind of out of place without a plan but I have a feeling you didn’t want one anyway. You realized early on that plans are more like suggestions, you can plan all you want but in each crucial moment luck and improvisation are your saviors.

Clearly, your parents have been telling you to eat your vegetables your entire life — there is no way a (well-thought out) plant-based diet can be bad for you. But because here in America we tend to be obsessed with steak and cheese, going vegan can be really hard. Or it can be really easy, depending on how you go about it.

Opinionated and abrasive, you go out of your way to make sure your worldviews conflict with everyone else’s. If you do happen to agree with a point someone else makes, you will find some minute detail to disagree on. For some reason you hate vodka with a passion, but you do realize gin is essentially juniper-flavored vodka, right?

The first thing I thought of was this bear attack video we watched in middle school, what you should do when you’re about to be eaten. It was a dumb impulse but it was all I had to work with so I slowed my breathing and played dead. Curiously, it worked.

This is a woman who was a single mother in a time when being one was sacrilegious, a blue-eyed blonde who spoke enough flirty German to rescue her father from the march to Majdanek, who sawed her own stilettos in half because her daughter wanted a pair of heels and who risked falling out of trees because she wanted to hang birdhouses.